After twenty years with Laban, Jacob hears that Laban's sons are complaining and sees that Laban's face has changed toward him. Then the LORD speaks: 3"Return to the land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I will be with you." The move is God's idea, and it comes with a promise. Jacob explains it to Rachel and Leah by recalling a dream in which the angel of God said, 13"I am the God of Bethel." Years earlier at Bethel Jacob had vowed that if God would be with him, God would be his God (Genesis 28:20). Here the God who kept the vow calls him home.
Jacob leaves without telling Laban. The text says he 20"tricked Laban," and the man who cheated others for years now flees the way he came. Rachel, meanwhile, 19"stole her father's household gods." Laban chases them for seven days. Then God warns Laban in a dream: 24"Be careful not to say anything to Jacob." Laban has the strength to harm him, and God stops it.
The scene at Jacob's tent is almost comic. Jacob, not knowing what Rachel took, swears that 32"Anyone with whom you find your gods shall not live." Rachel has hidden the gods in a camel's saddle and is sitting on them. Laban searches the tents and finds nothing. The man who worships gods that can be carried off, hidden, and sat upon cannot find them in a saddlebag. It is the same mockery Psalm 115 makes about idols. Jacob, wrongly certain of his own innocence, loses his temper and lists what twenty years of service cost him. He ends with the truth that matters most: 42"If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been on my side," Laban would have sent him away empty-handed.
Then the two men make a covenant, and the piled stones get a name. Laban calls the heap Mizpah, and the famous line comes with it: 49"The LORD watch between you and me, when we are out of one another's sight." Many people hear it as a blessing between friends. In the text it is closer to a warning from two men who do not trust each other. Laban goes on to say that if Jacob mistreats his daughters, God is the witness. The pact rests on suspicion, with the LORD as the one both men know they cannot hide from.
When trust between people has broken down, God still watches, and he sees what happens out of sight. The pile of stones admits that some relationships are held together only by the knowledge that God is looking.
The passage ends quietly. In the morning, 55"Laban arose and kissed his grandchildren and his daughters and blessed them." Then he goes home. A long, ugly quarrel closes without violence because God intervened, and the family that would become Israel moves on toward the land.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you were on Jacob's side, and that you are on ours when others have cheated us. Keep us from tricking those we should be honest with. Where trust between us and someone else is broken, remind us that you see what happens out of sight, and let us live so that we would not fear your watching. In Jesus' name, amen.